The War On Right Clicks

This is the personal and professional website of Charles H.F. Davis III, Ph.D.

I should probably pop over to the compulsive behaviors topic, since I highlight and right click the shit out of nearly every web page I read. In Chrome (Linux Version 62.0.3202.62 (Official Build) (64-bit)) when I right click, I get an alert:

With Chrome on Windows the menu only pops up if you hold right click and dismiss the alert with the keyboard. So I guess it "works" if you do it normally. Also, the context menu key works without any issue.

When I was maybe 13 years old, me and a bunch of friends all built our own shitty websites on some free hosting and we all used a bit of JS to show an alert on right click to stop everyone else from stealing our stuff (saving images, etc). Obviously it was trivial to work around, but hey, we were kids.

Which reminds me of this annoying "feature" of Tom's Hardware. The first visit of each day, hijack any click on a link (be left, right or middle) to pop up a box asking to sign up for their newsletter, then load the article in the current tab after dismissing the box.

Ugh. Really, wouldn't this be a good use for an API? I know that cluttering the browser with useless APIs is stupid, but a lot of websites want to do this, and only a very few should be allowed to. It seems like a good candidate for an API.

This site is requesting permission to override the default right click menu.

When I was maybe 13 years old, me and a bunch of friends all built our own shitty websites on some free hosting and we all used a bit of JS to show an alert on right click to stop everyone else from stealing our stuff (saving images, etc). Obviously it was trivial to work around, but hey, we were kids.

Until about 6 months ago, The Sun newspaper (thesun.co.uk) still fucking did this, a national newspaper with daily readership in the millions.

They're a bunch of scumbags, though, and have been since...ohh, about the 15th of April, 1989.

@arantor Worse, it seems like browsers actually implement their interface stuff in JS. If you pause the execution in the debugger in chrome you can't right click or scroll at all, even on a static website.

@khudzlin no, it's in reference to the Hillsborough disaster (it was a football stadium where there was a massive human crush and 96 people died) and The Sun had an article entitled 'THE TRUTH' about what happened, which ultimately was to blame the fans rather than, well, anything else.

To this day, Liverpool supporters hate The Sun, and not unreasonably so.

@arantor Worse, it seems like browsers actually implement their interface stuff in JS. If you pause the execution in the debugger in chrome you can't right click or scroll at all, even on a static website.

I would have guessed that JS runs in the same thread as the interface. Which kind of makes sense.

@arantor Worse, it seems like browsers actually implement their interface stuff in JS. If you pause the execution in the debugger in chrome you can't right click or scroll at all, even on a static website.

In Firefox, not only does hitting in the debugger still let me scroll (but only by rolling the scroll wheel on my mouse), but it doesn't even stop the "14 out of 16" up at the top from updating as I do.

It does, however, completely disable everything else on the page -- including the composer's textarea. It even stops CSS from activating/deactivating for :hover...

Also, even though right-clicking the page doesn't do anything, pressing still opens the menu (and if some element had focus, it does target it like it should).

@khudzlin no, it's in reference to the Hillsborough disaster (it was a football stadium where there was a massive human crush and 96 people died) and The Sun had an article entitled 'THE TRUTH' about what happened, which ultimately was to blame the fans rather than, well, anything else.

Yup, this.

I'm a Forest fan married to a Liverpool fan, the two teams present that day. There is understandably not a lot of love for the Sun in our house. Especially when it turned out that fault was ultimately with stadium management not preventing overcrowding & the police response making the crush worse.

With Chrome on Windows the menu only pops up if you hold right click and dismiss the alert with the keyboard. So I guess it "works" if you do it normally. Also, the context menu key works without any issue.

I tend to dismiss alerts by pressing the Escape key, so I'm very confused as to why that apparently means "redirect to SquareSpace login".

Got one of those buggers on a blog. Quickly fired up tampermonkey and patched that listener oput by straightforwardly nulling it. (implementing that as a fix on all sites isn't a good idea since some pages legitimately "catch" right clicks like google docs to provide a more contextual context menu

@arantor Worse, it seems like browsers actually implement their interface stuff in JS. If you pause the execution in the debugger in chrome you can't right click or scroll at all, even on a static website.

I would have guessed that JS runs in the same thread as the interface. Which kind of makes sense.

It shouldn’t, in Chrome. AFAIR, it used to in Firefox but they changed that recently?

The Sun is a tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Since The Sun on Sunday was launched in February 2012, the paper has been a seven-day operation. As a broadsheet, it was founded in 1964 as a successor to the Daily Herald; it became a tabloid in 1969 after it was purchased...

Worse is the war on middle clicks. Youtube has this annoying implementation in the playlist view where clicking exactly on the video works fine, but clicking on the whitespace (which is also set up as a link) turns into a left click. It's an extremely small difference, JS wise (window.location = x vs window.open(x)).

Worse is the war on middle clicks. Youtube has this annoying implementation in the playlist view where clicking exactly on the video works fine, but clicking on the whitespace (which is also set up as a link) turns into a left click. It's an extremely small difference, JS wise (window.location = x vs window.open(x)).

That'd be one of those extremely small differences that's all the difference in the world, right?

Worse is the war on middle clicks. Youtube has this annoying implementation in the playlist view where clicking exactly on the video works fine, but clicking on the whitespace (which is also set up as a link) turns into a left click. It's an extremely small difference, JS wise (window.location = x vs window.open(x)).

That'd be one of those extremely small differences that's all the difference in the world, right?